Wednesday Landscapes, 24 March 2021

You are invited to upload one or more of your landscape photos and, if you’d like, to accompany your image with some commentary: challenges you faced in making the image? your intent for the image? settings? post-processing decisions? why you did what you did? the place and time? or an aspect you’d like feedback on? And please feel free to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images (or unaccompanied words, for that matter) are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

 

Landscape in motion...

 

Ice and snow have melted and the vernal pond is teeming with frogs looking for love.

 

Dunes with bonus nuclear power plant on the horizon

Brick factory near Jaipur

Wraith Falls, Yellowstone National Park

 

Hwy 58 near the Elkhorn Road Intersection

Make sure you have backup headlamp batteries. Cross country road trip with my son to Utah. Headlamp batteries died and only managed to get off a few shots of Dark Sky, a disappearing feature of nature, before the trail, and any bread crumbs leading back to our car, completely vanished. 30 s exposure, 16mm f/2.5 Nikon D610.

 

One more of Smith Creek

 

Smith Creek, NE Georgia; one of Anna Ruby Falls' cascade in the BG

 

Another one of Smith Creek

 

Winter landscape, Teton Valley, Idaho.

 

When I first downloaded the image to this forum without the gray border the foreground snow looked entirely too dark in comparison with the white background that PN uses, even though the snow looked just right in Photoshop with a gray background. The brain wants snow to look white (at least mine does), so I needed to both brighten the foreground snow and add a gray border to start to approach what the image looks like in Photoshop.

Edited March 25, 2021 by Glenn McCreery

Here is the original color image for comparison. Again, the foreground snow looks fine in Photoshop with a gray background, and, to my eye, too dark with a white background.

Edited March 25, 2021 by Glenn McCreery

Interestingly, when I come back to my two images on PN an hour or two later, the snow in my black and white image now looks perhaps too bright, and the snow in the color image looks only slightly too dark! What do you think?

Cloudy today.

Interestingly, when I come back to my two images on PN an hour or two later, the snow in my black and white image now looks perhaps too bright, and the snow in the color image looks only slightly too dark! What do you think?

 

Interesting

Interestingly, when I come back to my two images on PN an hour or two later, the snow in my black and white image now looks perhaps too bright, and the snow in the color image looks only slightly too dark! What do you think?

 

(1) A viewer with at least a modicum of experience with both full color and monochrome should be able to tell just by means of the subject matter that the snow's color is white.

 

(2) To me, the snow in the flat area in the b & w version is somewhat blown out. This is not the case in the full color version.

 

Hope this helps, michael

Thanks for comments Michael.

 

Yes, the snow in the B&W version looks a little blown out. This is a result of increasing the snow's brightness in the posted version to match my conception of what the luminosity should be. There is more detail and noticeable tonal gradients in the full resolution image, with a gray background, in Photoshop. The color version shows a bit of a bluish tinge to the snow from the snow reflecting and scattering the sky's blue color. The histogram shows the expected blowing out of the sun's image, but not of the snow's texture. Visually, when standing by the field and looking toward the sun, the snow looked intensely bright white - dark glasses and a hat with a visor were required!

Thanks for comments Michael.

 

Yes, the snow in the B&W version looks a little blown out. This is a result of increasing the snow's brightness in the posted version to match my conception of what the luminosity should be. There is more detail and noticeable tonal gradients in the full resolution image, with a gray background, in Photoshop. The color version shows a bit of a bluish tinge to the snow from the snow reflecting and scattering the sky's blue color. The histogram shows the expected blowing out of the sun's image, but not of the snow's texture. Visually, when standing by the field and looking toward the sun, the snow looked intensely bright white - dark glasses and a hat with a visor were required!

A moment of whimsey. One of those crazy guessing games - for me "what does my photo look like on any computer but mine" - "What adjustments will make drops of dye on special paper, printed by a marvelous machine match what I see on the Camera monitor" or worse, my computer monitor. Really a tooth grinder. The only way I can think of to be certain is to get the print to work and send hard copy. Of course, first you have to get the print to work , then USPOS. Probably shortcomings in in my skill set!

Big Muddyscape with a bitta boats, and a smidgen of land

Interestingly, when I come back to my two images on PN an hour or two later, the snow in my black and white image now looks perhaps too bright, and the snow in the color image looks only slightly too dark! What do you think?

I think I'd side with your initial impression--I'd expect the scene to be almost painfully bright, and the B&W conveys that sense nicely while providing beautiful detail in the sky. It'd be very tempting to try an exposure gradient on the color one--maybe raising the foreground exposure by a stop while leaving the top of the frame as-is? In any case, I like the photos a lot, and I particularly like the contrasting contrasts of the foreground fence v. snow (dark against light) and the sun against sky (light against dark). It's surreal in the sense that this isn't something that one's eyes could see, given the actual brightness of the scene.